Every business depends greatly on its customer service. To be truly exceptional and meet goals identified for its clients, customer support must be well researched and adequately measured.
These 7 KPIs get you a view on customer support representatives’ performance. They also positively support the company-customer relationship. In this article, we will talk about customer support KPIs.
First Response Time
This KPI shows you the amount of time between your customer submitting a support ticket and your support team reviewing it and reaching out to the customer. Obviously, the lesser this time is – the better.
First Response Time is one of the most important KPIs, as it shows the response speed of your customer service. Customers tend to appreciate faster responses, as it allows them to feel that they and their needs are essential to the company. That is why the First Response Time metric is more valuable than, for example, Overall Reply.
First Contact Resolution Rate
With the help of the First Contact Resolution Rate KPI (aka FCR), you can see the tickets resolved during the first interaction between your company and the customer.
As you see, this metric hugely correlates with the general level of customer support satisfaction. However, for some reason, many business owners keep neglecting FCR while evaluating their customer support team’s work.
There are two main ways to measure this KPI. The first one is when your customer support specialist checks manually (or via an automated system) if the problem was resolved after the first call. The second one is to ask your customers some follow-up questions via a short survey.
Interactions-To-Resolution
As you probably have already guessed, Interaction-To-Resolution shows the number of interactions between the customer and your company’s support specialist until the problem is resolved. Note that a low value does not always equate to success.
There are complex cases that require more than one interaction to be optimally resolved. In these cases, quality ‘beats’ quantity. In general, however, if you keep this number low, it will only benefit your company.
Escalation Rate
Customer escalation is something that you should be trying to avoid by all means. In the world of customer support, escalation means that our client was not satisfied with the service provided by a regular customer support manager and wants to speak to someone of a higher level.
If this situation happens quite often, it could be a signal of serious malfunctions that cannot simply be fixed by a regular support manager’s assistance. When there is a high risk of escalation, you should provide your support specialists with intensive training to help them individually address situations that commonly lead to escalation.
Missed Calls
Even though we live in a modern era with emails and online chats, you should not forget about a slightly more ‘ancient’ way of communication – good old phone calls.
The more calls customer support misses – the less satisfied your customers will be. That equation is pretty simple. What can you do in this case, though? First of all, make sure that you have enough employees to handle the flow of requests.
Secondly, please provide them with the proper training to know how to handle difficult situations and resolve problems with minimal interactions. Third, ensure they resonate with positive company culture and values in the interaction. These three simple tips might actually save you a lot of money as missed calls can be quite pricey for a business.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)
CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction and shows how happy clients are with their products or customer support. This KPI is straightforward to measure – in most cases, customers are just asked whether they are satisfied with the product or received service and rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. The final score of the question is usually based on its type, so it is up to you to decide how you want to measure your customers’ satisfaction.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a KPI that divides your customers into three categories – promoters, passives, and detractors.
The first category includes clients who are loyal to your brand and most likely will give positive feedback and recommend your services to their friends. Passive customers are also satisfied. However, they often lack the desire to do something to help promote your services. Finally, the third category includes those who are not satisfied with your company, nor its services.
The measurement method for this metric is pretty easy. All you have to do is to include your customer support survey a question where on a scale from 1 to 10, your clients would have to rate the possibility of them recommending your company’s services to someone else.
Conclusion
Surely, there are more than just 7 customer support KPIs out there. However, these 7 are the most important ones to measure, track, and act upon over time. By utilizing these metrics, you can see your company’s customer support lacks and possibly improve your team’s performance.
